Nvidia Unveils Next Weapon in Smartphone Chip Wars

Nvidia has been on a long-term campaign to move its chip franchise beyond graphics for personal computers into the faster-growing market for mobile devices. So far, it’s had better results in tablets than smartphones–but Nvidia has a new weapon to change that.

The Silicon Valley company on Tuesday is providing the first details of a chip called the Tegra 4i, which addresses a key technology gap.

Smartphones, while they are becoming powerful pocket-sized computers, also need to communicate wirelessly. There’s also not much space inside them, so handset makers often prefer chips that combine computing and communications on the same piece of silicon.

Qualcomm helped pioneer the market for such products–called SoCs, for systems on a chip–and has built a big head start over rivals in offering the speedy fourth-generation technology called LTE. Several competing companies–including Broadcom, as well as Nvidia–are using next week’s Mobile World Congress to show off their first products to address that shortcoming.

Nvidia’s 4i uses a novel technology it acquired through the purchase of a startup called Icera. Rather than building in dedicated modem circuitry for the radio-related functions needed to move among various LTE and 3G networks, the 4i allows them to be configured using software instructions.

Such a “software-defined” radio, or SDR, is designed to be adaptable to work on different cellular networks or frequencies–even after smartphones are in the hands of users.

“Everyone has always felt an SDR would be the holy grail,” said Phil Carmack, the senior vice president in charge of Nvidia’s mobile business unit. “They want to be as adaptable as possible.”

Nvidia says the cellular circuitry takes up less circuitry on its new chip than on competing products. Partly as a result, Nvidia says the Tegra 4i is about half the size of Qualcomm’s comparable chip and significantly faster. (Size matters to chip makers, since smaller chips are less expensive to manufacture).

Qualcomm, in remarks during and after the recent Consumer Electronic Show, has made equally optimistic claims about the performance of its S800. So have Samsung, Intel and Imagination Technologies; the latter’s technologies are used in processors designed by Apple and others.

The Tegra 4i is based on the same basic design as the Tegra 4, which was introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show and is mainly aimed at tablets. Nvidia expects the smartphone version to arrive in commercial handsets toward the end of 2013.

Sometime before that analysts and publications are likely to do performance tests that should provide some independent analysis of which chips will actually be the fastest and offer the best battery life. But there’s no debate that more competition is coming.

“We will have to see side-by-side when we have some devices,” said Patrick Moorhead, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategies. “On paper it looks good.”

Much of the action for processor makers may be outside the U.S., Moorhead says, because Apple and Samsung account for much of that market and design their own chips. He said Nvidia was smart to build the 4i with support for a cellular standard popular in China.